Preventing spam from reaching your mailboxes is an ongoing battle. We
reject over 25000 blatant spam messages per day, and another 1500 + come
to me for review.

Students often email their homework to their teachers and often these
emails are mistakenly flagged as spam. Usually I find them and forward
them to the teacher, but there is always a chance I will miss something
with 1500 messages to sift through.

So, in an effort to keep student’s homework from getting “lost”
in our spam filter, I have added a rule to our spam filter. Any message
with the word HOMEWORK or CLASSWORK or SCHOOLWORK or ESSAY in the subject of the message will be “whitelisted”, which
means that the spam filter would be very unlikely to flag it as spam,
and if it does, I will be able to spot it quickly. These four words were
chosen because they are “safe” words that would be very unlikely
to appear in regular spam messages.

An example email subject might be like
this:
Subject: HOMEWORK: My essay about world history.

Although you don’t have to ask your students to add these words
to the subject of their email to you, adding either HOMEWORK or CLASSWORK
or SCHOOLWORK or ESSAY to the subject of their message will help ensure that their
hard work reaches teachers in a timely fashion. Teachers who have done this in the past few years have indicated that it does help.

Besides, students (and everyone) should
get in the habit of using a subject in an email message as good email
etiquette.

As always, if you have any questions,
please call the helpdesk at 977-4936.